“Then this is the end of things, is it?” he asked, after an awkward silence, in a voice he strove in vain to keep from shaking.
“What things?” said the other.
Plowden shrugged his shoulders, framed his lips to utter something which he decided not to say, and at last turned on his heel. “Good day,” he called out over his shoulder, and left the room with a flagrant air of hostility.
Thorpe, wandering about the apartment, stopped after a time at the cabinet, and helped himself to a drink. The thing most apparent to him was that of set purpose he had converted a friend into an enemy. Why had he done this? He asked himself the question in varying forms, over his brandy and soda, but no convincing answer came. He had done it because he had felt like doing it. It was impossible to trace motives further than that.
CHAPTER XVIII
“EDITH will be down in a very few moments,” Miss Madden assured Thorpe that evening, when he entered the drawing-room of the house she had taken in Grafton Street.
He looked into her eyes and smiled, as he bowed over the hand she extended to him. His glance expressed with forceful directness his thought: “Ah, then she has told you!”
The complacent consciousness of producing a fine effect in evening-clothes had given to Mr. Stormont Thorpe habitually now a mildness of manner, after the dressing hour, which was lacking to his deportment in the day-time. The conventional attire of ceremony, juggled in the hands of an inspired tailor, had been brought to lend to his ponderous figure a dignity, and even something of a grace, which the man within assimilated and made his own. It was an equable and rather amiable Thorpe whom people encountered after nightfall—a gentleman who looked impressive enough to have powerful performances believed of him, yet seemed withal an approachable and easy-going person. Men who saw him at midnight or later spoke of him to their womenkind with a certain significant reserve, in which trained womankind read the suggestion that the “Rubber King” drank a good deal, and was probably not wholly nice in his cups.
This, however, could not be said to render him less interesting in any eyes. There was indeed about it the implication of a generous nature, or at the least of a blind side—and it is not unpleasant to discover these attributes in a new man who has made his half-million, and has, or may have, countless favours to bestow.